In this Treehouse Quick Tip, we’re going to learn how to edit HTML. Before I tell you what we should do, let’s go over what we should not do.

Make sure that you don’t edit your HTML in a word processing application like Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or Google Docs. These programs add special formatting that’s invisible to you and me, but will not play nice with a web browser.

Text editors allow you to create html web pages without special formatting. You can start editing with Notepad in Windows and TextEdit on a Mac for free, or you can download Sublime Text if you want a more feature-rich HTML editor.

Video Transcription

Nick: Hi, I’m Nick. In this Treehouse Quick Tip we are going to learn how
to edit HTML. Before I tell you what we should do, let’s go
ahead and go over what we shouldn’t do. Make sure that you
don’t edit your HTML in a word processing application like
Microsoft Word, Apple Pages or Google Docs. These programs
add special formatting that’s invisible to you and me, but
will not play nice with a web browser.

These days most web designers and developers use what’s
called a text editor. This is a type of program that allows
you to edit documents in plain text just as they are. Let’s
look at few popular ones.

If you’re using a PC and you’re on windows you can actually
get started with Notepad, which included with your
operating system. If you’re on a Mac, you can use Text
Edit. If you do use Text Edit, be sure you go up to the
format menu then you click on, Make Plain Text before you
actually go to save your document. This will insure that
there’s no rich formatting included with your plain text.

However, a really great text editor for beginners and
advanced users alike is, Sublime Text 2. It’s available for
Windows, Mac, and Lennox. You can go to Sublimetext.com/2
and then download the installer that is appropriate for
your operating system. Once you’ve installed Sublime Text
2, it will look something like this. If you try Sublime and
you like it, then you can go ahead and pay for a license.

By default, most text editors will want to save a file as a
text file or .txt file. However, when you save your files
with the intention of creating a HTML webpage, you’ll want
to save them with the .html file extension.

Announcer: If you’d like to see more advanced video and tutorials like
this one, go to teamtreehouse.com and start learning for
free.